Premiere 6.5 offers nearly 80 special video effects. Author Jeff Sengstack introduced several in the previous chapter. Here he takes readers on a tour of most of the rest (he saves the top-of-the-line effects for Chapter 13). Most Premiere how-to book simply gloss over video effects, expecting readers to discover their utility on their own. Sengstack believes these effects are a strong characteristic of Premiere and gives them all individual coverage including offering suggested circumstances for their use.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Premiere's video effects run the gamut from simple to complex. They have
a wide range of uses. Some you may rely on regularly, whereas others fill such
narrow niches they may never see the light of day.

With 79 video effects staring up at you, it's darned hard to know when
and why to use any one of them. In this hour I'll single out my favorites
and try to make sense of the rest.

The highlights of this hour include the following:

Categorizing and simplifying Premiere's video effects

My favorite video effects and how to use them

The hidden power of QuickTime video effects

Making Sense of the Plethora of Video Effects

It's not easy wading through Premiere's 14 video effects categories,
trying to unravel what their 79 effects do and how they do it (see Figure
12.1).

Consider that some effects have multiple functions with numerous options. The
QuickTime effect alone offers 15 effects with a dozen subeffects.

The categories themselves can be confounding. The Gamma Correction video
effect is in the Image Control file folder but is also a feature of the
Levels effect in the Adjust file folder. Convolution Kernel is in the
Adjust folder but handles 10 different functions of effects in the
Blur, Stylize, and Sharpen folders. And the Transform
effect is not in the Transform file folder.

Some effects resolve rarely encountered technical problems, such as missing
fields or "interlace flicker." Still others don't seem to achieve
their stated purposes.

To create these new categories, open the Video Effects palette, click the
fly-out menu triangle, select New Folder, and create your folders. Then drag and
drop effect icons to the new folders.

Once you're done, delete the old file folder category names by selecting
them and clicking the trashcan icon in the bottom-right corner. Actually, old
folders never die, they "hide." If you select Show Hidden from the
fly-out menu, you'll see the old, default categories at the bottom of the
palette. No matter what you do, you cannot delete an effect from within
Premiere.

There's a surprising amount of redundancy in Premiere's video
effects. For instance, three effects create black-and-white video. To further
eliminate clutter, I've selected the best of near-equals and placed the
also-rans in one other categoryDuplicates.

I'll take you through each of those categories, saving the specialized
After Effects (AE) effects for Hour 13, "Wrapping Up Effects with After
Effects." I'll also note my favorite effects and explain how to use
them.